


Meeting the Twins

by Keysmasher



Series: Good Girl [12]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Allergies, Back Problems, Bad doctor, Bad therapist, Discussion of squicky medical things in very blunt terms, Hospitalization, Mental Health Issues, Multi, Recovery, When hydromorphone does nothing you know you're screwed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-03
Updated: 2013-12-03
Packaged: 2018-01-03 07:40:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,412
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1067825
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Keysmasher/pseuds/Keysmasher
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Maria meets the twins, has an unhelpful therapy session, and is discharged</p>
            </blockquote>





	Meeting the Twins

Four days after the agents left, Maria was moved out of isolation. Cas, Dean, and Sam brought Aspian and Anna. She couldn't hold them very long - her strength was sapped by the infection she'd fought off and the surgeries she'd undergone - but the two were carefully placed on her chest.

"Hey, babies," she said softly. "I'm your mom. Oh, crap. What are they going to call us?"

"What?" Dean asked blankly.

She kept her voice soft. "There are three of you. Is it going to be, like, Dad, Daddy, and Pop, or Sam, Cas, and Dean, or a mix, or-"

"Hey, hey," Sam said, gently smoothing her hair back. "We have time to figure it out. They won't be talking for another, what, year and a half or so?"

Dean and Maria looked at him like he'd grown a third arm. "You started talking at thirteen months," Dean said slowly.

"That's when he _started?_ " Maria blurted, almost afraid to ask.

Dean rolled his eyes. "It's when we could tell what he wanted, anyway. His first real word was at, like, ten months."

"When was yours?" Sam shot back.

Dean shrugged. "Not sure I ever knew. Your first word was 'book', though."

"Mine was 'bee'," Maria said.

"When was that?" Cas asked.

"Five months, I think? It's mostly babbling, then, putting sounds together, but it really depends. Twins, though…" she sighed. "My mom said we built off each other, and off our older brother. Laura was the cautious one; they called me the stunt baby, and Laura'd wait to see if I got in trouble before she tried. I started actually _talking_ talking at six months."

"What about walking?" Cas asked.

"Sam was fourteen months, I think," Dean said.

"I was eight, Laura was ten," Maria said. "She was a little closer to average." Her petty, vindictive streak urged her to say something rude, but she shoved it back. She didn't want to be that person. "We're definitely going to have to finish childproofing the house before that point. Good thing we don't have stairs."

"Couldn't we just block them off with chairs or something?" Sam asked.

Dean and Maria both groaned. "Mom told me I'd sit there and untangle them," Maria said. "First problem I ever solved, _which chair do I pull first?_ "

"You'd do the same," Dean told him. "I had to watch you _constantly._ Those child leashes? Wish they had 'em back then for you."

"Dean," the other three said together, scandalized.

"We are _never_ putting our children on leashes," Maria said firmly.

"We never discussed vaccines, either," Sam said, suddenly worried.

She blinked at him. "Did we need to?"

Sam and Dean shared a glance, speaking without words in a way she envied. "We definitely want them done," Sam said. "Cas?"

"I don't know enough to have an opinion," he said hastily.

"When it comes to MMR and DTaP, yeah, I want them vaccinated," Maria said. "But chicken pox, I kinda don't want them to get when they're adults because it's so much worse. Cas? You're gonna be the one at home with them all the time."

"I don't know enough," he repeated stubbornly. "I'll look when we get back home."

"Don't believe anything that says vaccines cause autism," she half-ordered. "If you find a site that _does_ say that, back out, don't believe anything they say. Bunch of loons."

Dean frowned. "Wasn't there some study that proved it?"

"The doctor lost his medical license for bad science and moved to Texas. A ton of studies have found no causal link," Maria said.

Sam chuckled. "Oh, baby, talk like you've got PhDs," he joked.

She rolled her eyes. "What, _causal link?_ That's intro stats, babe, not exactly PhD material." The baby in green - Aspian - opened his dark blue eyes and whined. "Hey, baby," she said softly, rubbing his small back with her thumb. "How ya doin'?"

His sister, dressed in yellow, yawned, tiny hand curled into a fist. "You're both going to be heartbreakers when you grow up," she whispered to them. "Your daddy's genes, you can't be anything but."

"I don't know," Dean said, "Sam was a funny-lookin' kid."

"What is your problem?" Sam snapped, glaring at him.

"What's Anna's eye color?" she interrupted, trying to head off the fight.

"What? Uh, brown," Sam said.

"And Aspian's are blue, huh?" She smiled down at them, knowing that brown eyes meant Cas was definitely _not_ their biological father: two blue-eyed people couldn't make a brown-eyed baby. "Good luck getting people to believe you're twins, you two."

"Won't eye color change?" Sam asked.

She shrugged. "It might. It might not."

"Don't twins have to have the same eye color, though?"

She shook her head. "I knew a set where one had green and one had brown. Blood type doesn’t have to match either, I'm A and Laura's O. For added fun, our older brother's B." She snorted. "On the bright side, we all know our genotype. Now. I know they did tests when Aspian and Anna first got here - what were the results?"

"All normal," Dean said. "Got ourselves a couple of healthy kids."

"Awesome," she said, smiling. "Hear that, babies? You're healthy. It's a leg up on me."

"Speaking of. How's your head?" Dean asked super-casually.

She shifted and hissed. "Painkiller fog, mostly, though that's going away."

"That's not what I meant," he said gently.

She looked down at the kids. "It's...it's okay," she said quietly. "I've mostly been asleep so I didn't have to really think, but...no more periods, right? No more PMS. And after this, I don't think I'd handle another pregnancy well anyway, so it's a win all around on that front."

"Yeah, but…" Dean trailed off.

Sam took over. "We've all been held captive before," he said gently. "And not one of us was _ever_ pregnant while it happened. So if you need to talk, I mean, I know a lot of the time you keep it bottled up because you don't feel like you deserve to complain, but that's...kinda what we're here for. Thick and thin. 'Til death do us part, and maybe not even then, Cas's a former angel, he can probably call in some favors so the four of us share Heaven. And even if he doesn't, well, Heaven's a loop of your greatest memories. Maybe it's vain, but I think we qualify."

She thought about Saturday nights curled up next to them on the couch, laughing at bad movies and eating pizza with heavy socks on even in the summer, and nodded. "Yeah. You do. And these two probably will, eventually." She stroked Anna's head through her hat with a thumb.

Cas slipped his hand into hers and rubbed her knuckles. "Whatever you need," he told her. "Even if it's just hand lotion, because you're getting a little dry here."

She laughed a bit. "I know, right? Two more days and they'll be bleeding. Stupid winter."

Cas half-smiled and reached for Anna when she began to fuss. "I think somebody's hungry."

Maria smiled but didn't interfere when Cas rummaged in the dark blue diaper bag for a bottle. "I think the nurses have a microwave," Sam offered, reaching for it.

"Thank you," Cas said, passing it off. "Do you mind heating one up for Aspian, as well?"

"Course not." Cas passed him another one. "They get hungry around the same time, anyway."

"Yeah?" Maria asked, resting a hand on Aspian's leg because it seemed safer than putting that weight on his back.

"Yeah," Dean said, twisting so his spine popped. 

The noise woke Aspian fully and he began to cry. She started to reach for him with her other hand, but before she could, Dean was there, picking him up and bouncing him gently. He calmed down fast, and she felt an ache, watching them; what kind of mother was she, that she couldn't even calm her own child?

 _A drugged one,_ her common sense told her. _When did you start wanting them, anyway?_

 _It's not like I actively_ didn't _want them,_ she argued with herself. _I was just...ambivalent._

_The way you were ambivalent until you tried to kill yourself?_

_Fuck off, asshole._

"How long until you're discharged?" Cas asked.

"Doctor said two days, max," she answered. "And they want me to talk to a psychologist today, said they'd be in around two. They have to wean me off the hydro before they can release me."

"Makes sense," Dean said. "I assume they're writing you a prescription?"

"Oh yes," she said. "Oooh, yes. I'm not going back home without painkillers." She yawned. 

"Weren't you supposed to stop being tired after you gave birth?" Cas teased.

"Oh, shut up," she grumbled. She'd just had major surgery; when they'd put the rods in she'd slept for fifteen hours a day for _weeks,_ and the repair work, though not as extensive, was still quite a bit to recover from. When the rod had popped out, it had taken a fair bit of her lowest three vertebrae and a piece of her hip with it, requiring some sort of prosthetic to be made and fitted, which she hadn't known was possible. It _certainly_ hadn't been possible when she was a child having the rods screwed in, or the disc space wouldn't have narrowed nearly as much. Rather than replace the piece of the rod that had broken, they had left the bone unsupported; scoliosis tended to stabilize in adulthood, and twenty-odd years after she'd been fused the odds of her spine curving again were negligible.

Sam came back in, bottles both in one massive hand. "Hey, guys."

"Hey," they all chorused.

Cas studied her a moment. "Would you like to feed Anna?" he asked, offering her the baby.

She smiled and accepted her, cradling the child in her arm and taking the bottle from Sam. Dean took the other for Aspian. She watched the level of formula in the bottle get lower and lower, until Anna had drunk it all; she was honestly surprised it had all gone down.

Cas lifted Anna from her arms when she started fussing again and put her on his shoulder, where a cloth was already down. Aspian mirrored Anna's pose on Dean's shoulder. Sam watched them, face soft and open, and it hit her again just how goddamn lucky she was.

Hours later, after they'd brought in a lunch tray for her (she was finally off the liquid diet) and cleared it away, there was a knock on the door. "Maria Brasen?" a woman asked.

"Hi," she said, smiling at her.

"Hi. I'm Dr. Loudon - the psychologist?"

"Should we give you some privacy?" Sam asked, reaching forward to pick Aspian and Anna off her chest. She pecked a quick kiss to each of the babies' foreheads before he pulled them away. Cas was packing up the diaper bag.

"Yes, thanks," Loudon said belatedly. "Cute kids."

"Thanks," Dean said, standing and cracking his back again. Anna fussed; Sam bounced her a little and she calmed down.

Cas kissed the corner of her mouth. "We'll be back when you're done," he murmured.

"Can't wait," she said. "Gets boring, being alone in a hospital."

Sam chuckled. "We know." He swooped down and kissed her forehead, Dean her cheek.

When they were gone, Loudon sat in one of the recently-vacated chairs and pulled a slim blue notebook from her shoulder bag, a small frown on her lips. This close, Maria could see her red hair was lightly streaked with gray, and her eyes were green behind her wire-rimmed glasses. She pushed her own higher on her nose and waited.

"You have some good-looking men in your life," Loudon said. "Which one's your husband?"

"Theoretically? Cas. The shortest one," she said. "Well, not that he's really short. Practically? I mean, we all live together, we're all basically married to each other."

Loudon jotted down a note. "Do you feel safe in your home?"

"I - yes, of course," she said, bewildered. Had something they'd done made Loudon think one of them was a threat?

"Are you sure?" she pressed.

"Very," Maria said coldly.

"One hundred percent?"

"Cas, he pulled my last boyfriend off when he started beating me. Sam and Dean have never laid a hand on me. So yes, one hundred percent, and I'd appreciate it if you'd stop trying to make them out to be bad guys."

Loudon swallowed and made another note. "How old are you?"

"Thirty-three."

"That's a little late to have kids, don't you think?"

"If we'd met earlier, we would have had kids earlier."

"So you met late in life?"

"I was, eh, twenty-seven or so when I met Sam and Dean."

She made yet another note. "Why did it take you so long to have kids, if you met six years ago?"

"It worked out that way."

"Do you have any family in your life?"

"Other than my boys? No."

"Your file says you were twin B - what happened there?"

"My family wasn't particularly impressed with my choice of partners. They disowned me."

"What made your family nervous?"

"There were three of them."

"Were they worried you'd get hurt?"

"They were worried I would get a bad reputation, which would reflect poorly on them."

"Do you think you're being a little hard on them?"

"No."

"Any chance for reconciliation?"

"Maybe there's a chance, but I sure as hell won't take it."

"What do you do for a living?"

"I run the museum in town."

"Prestigious job."

"Someone has to do it."

"Have you thought about childcare?"

"Cas is staying at home with them while he finishes his degree."

"He's in his thirties and he doesn’t have a degree yet?"

"No."

"Is that a source of tension?"

"No."

She put down the notebook and pen. "I'm sensing some hostility here."

"Possibly because you started by implying my partners were beating me, I'm too old to be a mother, and I fucked up by leaving my toxic family. Not exactly a solid foundation for warm and fuzzies."

"You're required to talk to me. This'll go much easier if you do that."

Rage swelled, impotent beneath her skin. "One, I am not required to talk to _you._ I am not _required_ to talk to anyone. Two, this would have gone easier if you hadn't come in with the idea that I must be being abused somehow. Three, this interview is over."

"You have to talk to somebody-"

"Then send one of your coworkers in here, 'cause I'm done talking to you."

"You can't just expect people to bend to your will-"

"I ain't askin' you to bend to my will," she snapped. _Shit._ If the South was coming out in her speech, she _really_ needed to calm down. "I'm tellin' you there's no way I trust you enough to talk candidly after the shit you just pulled."

"They're basic questions. We ask everybody!"

"You ask everybody three times if they're safe?" she asked incredulously. "You ask everybody if there's a chance of reconciliation when their family disowned them for the sake of their reputation? You ask everybody if they think they're too old to be a mother?"

Loudon blinked. "Well, put that way, it does sound a little…."

"Asinine?" Maria said sharply when she trailed off. "Get out. If you _really_ need to, send down somebody who can treat me like a capable adult. If I can be discharged without having to deal with another one of you clowns, don't even bother."

Loudon chose to flee. Maria closed her eyes, took deep breaths, and tried to will herself calm.

Fifteen minutes later, there was a knock on her door to announce somebody's presence. "Hello, Maria," someone half-sang.

"Hey, Doc. How's it going?"

Doctor Fitzgerald smiled at her. "Well as ever. Nobody's thrown up on me yet today."

"Always good, always good."

"Yep. Saw Loudon running away from here not too long ago. You put the fear of God into her?"

"Put the fear of _something_ into her," Maria said.

"Oh, this is gonna be a good story," he said, fiddling with one of the drips. "What happened?"

"She implied I was being abused, told me I was too old to have kids, and acted like cutting ties with my parents was...stupid, maybe is the right word for it."

Fitzgerald blinked at her. "You're shitting me."

"Nope."

He let out a low whistle. "No wonder she ran. What's the quote, 'nothing scarier than a gentle man angry' or something?"

"There are three things all wise men fear: the sea in a storm, the night with no moon, and the anger of a gentle man," she recited.

"Good memory."

"Only if it makes an impression." She let out a slow breath.

"That really got you angry, didn't it."

"What made me _angry_ was being treated like I was incapable of making decisions for myself," she half-growled, and _shit_ she _really_ needed to calm down. The doctor left without a word and she took some more deep breaths, hoping to calm herself down, but when that escalated into hyperventilation she figured she needed something else.

When she'd been in college, her first year, it was the first time she'd been away from her parents for any length of time. It was the first time she'd ever been told that _therapy_ didn't mean _weakness_ without her family telling her it was a lie. Her first semester there, one of her professors had killed herself; her second semester, a friend had. In a moment of weakness, she'd fired off an email to her roommate admitting her previous suicide attempt and that she really wasn't okay. Her roommate had gotten their RA involved, who had gotten the building director involved, who had gotten the dean's office involved, who had told her her choices were go to counseling or drop out. Unsurprisingly, she'd chosen counseling. After the attempt when she was a teenager, she'd been given drugs and had met with a therapist twice before her parents made her stop; her freshman year she stayed off the drugs but met with someone every week for an hour.

One of the things she'd learned was mindfulness meditation, good for pulling herself out of a panic attack, depressive spiral, or invasive thought process. She was already halfway to panic attack, and she tried to remember the voice of her counselor.

 _Five things you hear,_ that was - squeaky shoes in the hallway, her own breathing, voices at the nurses' station, the quiet whirr of the ventilation system, the rustle of sheets when she moved her hand.

 _Four things you feel_ \- the sheets, the needles, the bed, the rail she was gripping so tightly her fingers were purpling and going numb.

 _Three things you see_ \- the overhead light, the wall, the window that wouldn't open.

She did that again and again, finding new things each time. She made it through three more cycles before she heard the clumping of boots on tile; she opened her eyes to find her men walking in.

"Hey, Maria," Dean said cheerfully. "How'd it go?"

"Eh." She shrugged, sending a ripple of pain through her back - they couldn't even give her painkillers that worked worth a damn, why had she thought the therapist assigned to her would be any good?

"That well, huh?" Sam asked, leaning forward to kiss her forehead. "You're shaking. It was bad, then?"

"It's fine," she said. "Anna and Aspian do okay?"

It was a stupid-ass subject change, given that the three of them had each spent more time with their kids than she had, but they didn't push it. "Fine," Sam said. "Diaper change and sleep."

"Can't wait 'til they're old enough to be interesting," Dean joked.

Cas chuckled. "They are a bit...dull."

"May I?" she asked, holding out an arm.

"Of course," Cas said, handing her Aspian.

"Hey, baby boy," she said softly. "Can't wait 'til you're old enough to wrestle with your sister."

"You think Anna'll be into wrestling?" Dean asked skeptically.

She chuckled. "Aren't all kids into wrestling?"

"Point," Sam said. "Although when they get _older_ older, we're probably going to teach them how to actually fight."

"Probably a good idea," Maria agreed. "As long as they know not to pick fights with other people."

"Mm," Dean said noncommittally.

"There's something else we never really discussed," Maria said. "Religion. Church: yay or nay?"

"Nay," Cas said instantly. "I have been attending several church services over the past few weeks. They all spread misinformation. I will educate them at home."

The other three nodded, accepting this, and for a moment it was quiet.

"So, anything interesting happen at work?" she asked Sam and Dean.

Dean grinned. "Got a Corvette in today. Owner just bought her, wants her painted red with some detailing work…"

He kept going, describing the car in minute detail, and she rubbed Aspian's back and listened to his voice. It was a good voice, deep, smooth. It worked on her nerves better than breathing had.

Her mind drifted off, to the project she'd let fall by the wayside in the rush of pregnancy and hospitalization. She only had six months to get the writing display up and running, which meant she had four to finalize the details and order the information plaques. Had she remembered to put in the difference between Sumerian and Babylonian cuneiform? Or kanji, hiragana, and katakana? Or even British, American, and Australian English? What about Northern American and Southern American English? Brazilian Portuguese and Portugal Portuguese? What about examples - had she included enough of those? She really needed to get her notes and get back up to speed with her own thoughts.

At four, an hour after they reappeared, Cas checked his watch. "I should get going," he said reluctantly. "I have class in an hour."

"Which class?" Maria asked.

"Calculus." He leaned over and kissed her, one hand on her shoulder, the other on Aspian. "I won't be back before visiting hours are over."

"Then I'll see you tomorrow, when I get released," she said.

Cas kissed the back of Aspian's head. "Tomorrow," he said, like a promise.  
***  
Because life just hated her that way, the next day was both Dr. Fitzgerald's day off and the day she was being released. That would have been fine - she couldn't exactly expect him to be at the hospital every damn day - had the guy replacing him not been a dumbass.

He rattled off instructions for home care, including no penetrative sex for at least a month, and ended by saying, "I'll be prescribing you Percocet-"

"No you won't," Maria said sharply.

"You don't want opioids?" the doctor asked blankly.

"I'm allergic to acetaminophen."

"Percocet doesn't have acetaminophen," he said condescendingly.

"Opioids don't absorb well in tablet form, so they're _usually_ paired with Tylenol," she snapped. "Percocet's, what, oxycodone mixed with Tylenol? Something like that?"

"You think you know more about drugs than a doctor?"

"I _know_ I know more about opioids than you do," she said bluntly. "If I didn't, you wouldn't have tried to give me something I can't tolerate. Look, is there someone else I can talk to?"

"Nobody else is on duty."

She raised her eyebrows skeptically. "There's not a single other doctor on duty in this hospital? You alone are responsible for everyone who's admitted?"

"Look, just admit you're drug-seeking and get it over with."

Rage flared yet again, and she was yelling before she knew it. "Drug-seeking? _Drug-seeking?_ You _really_ think that's what this is about when you're trying to give me something that will _stop my lungs from working?!_ It's on my fucking chart that I'm allergic to acetaminophen, none of my meds have included the damn thing, and I just had three of my vertebrae _ripped in fucking half!_ Of fucking course I'm looking for drugs, I'm in fucking pain and you're trying to kill me!"

"What is going on in here?" someone asked from the doorway. The coat marked her as a doctor; the ID card read 'head of inpatient care' with her name in smaller letters underneath. Maria couldn't make out the name.

"Drug-seeking patient," the first doctor said dismissively.

"He told me he was prescribing me Percocet," Maria snapped. "I'm allergic to acetaminophen."

"Nobody's allergic to acetaminophen," he said with a laugh.

"Look, buddy, I know what I'm allergic to. Check the fucking chart if you don't believe me."

"I don't need to check your chart to know you're lying-" he began.

The woman cut him off by plucking the chart from the end of the bed and scanning it. "You moron," she said. "It's right here."

"What?" he asked blankly, taking the clipboard and staring at it.

"Go wait in my office," she said, voice quiet.

"But-"

 _"Go._ "

She waited until he was gone to say, "I'm sorry about him. Rest assured he won't be in charge of prescribing anything anytime soon."

Maria took a few deep breaths to try to get herself under control. "Sorry for losing my temper there."

"I would have too, to be honest. Let me just see...oh, ouch, fusion failure?" She winced. "Twenty years after the fact, that's unusual. What happened?"

"Maniac abducted me, tied me to a bed. I went into labor and an FBI agent delivered the kids." Maria shrugged and winced at the pain. "Rod popped out."

"Ouch," the doctor said again. "I'm Denise Langer, by the way."

"Maria Brasen."

"Okay, so following your admission you also had a hysterectomy. Must have been quite a traumatic birth."

"I was out for most of it."

"And you've been a chronic pain patient since you were fourteen?"

"Yep."

"So that's nineteen years. It says you're mostly on NSAIDs and muscle relaxants."

"Not that they do much, but yeah."

"And your patient pump...you pressed it sixty-seven times in an hour?"

"It did almost nothing."

"That was hydromorphone."

"Again: it did almost nothing."

"Well, see, that's a problem. Hydromorphone's called 'drugstore heroin' - it's the most effective painkiller that currently exists. If you're not responding to that, I'm not sure what else we can give you."

She was suddenly fifteen again, hearing _There's nothing else we can do for you_ with the implied _You're going to be in pain forever._ "There has to be something," she said, almost begging.

Langer sighed. "We can try straight oxycodone," she offered. "There's a high risk of addiction, though."

Maria nodded. "I can deal with that."

**Author's Note:**

> Please don't read this as 'therapists are evil!!!11!' I know a lot of people who have been helped by therapy. But there are some shitty therapists out there.
> 
> Also, the whole painkillers-aren't-helping thing is drawing from my own experience, both as a chronic pain patient and as someone who recovered from major surgery with painkillers that did absolutely nothing. I honestly have no idea if the scaffolding I mentioned is even possible; however, Maria being able to stay awake for so long less than a week after having said surgery is really pushing the bounds of fiction.
> 
> I hope you enjoyed! Please review.


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